Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Shortly before I'm due to visit Brazil to do some talks, Guilherme Kujawski has done a swift interview available in Portuguese here. For those restricted to English, here's the text:

1. McKenzie Wark is wondering what is the role of critical theory in the Anthropocene era. Do you think somehow film theory (or cinema studies) can contribute to this debate? I ask this inspired by your excellent book Eco Media...
If ecology is the science that undertakes to understand the connections between everything, and media are the connections between everyone, the question is how to connect everyone with everything. By media let's understand every channel we use to connect: language, money, sex as well as films and phones. Mediation is older, deeper and wider than communication. Communication arrives when there is a gap between sender and receiver. Mediation is the connection between them. Sunlight for example mediates the sun and the earth. Ecological critique works when it works at the level of mediation: how does the world mediate human life and how does human life mediate the world? Historically this has become the question: how does the world communicate to us and how do we communicate with it? Communication as a splitting of primordial connectivity creates humans as subjects and world as object: the task of critique in the Anthropocene is to advance beyond this relation, on which is founded both our exploitation and our sentimental and nostalgic view on the world.
2. Videogame designers are mired in issues such as high resolution imagery and hyperrealism. And in the world of moving images people only talk about very-high-quality digital media over photonic networks. But narratives experiments are stucked for decades, in my opinion (films are each day much the same as games, and vice-versa). Do you think experiments in narratives could be the next frontier in the moving images realm?
Hi-definition and its transmission means using more materials and more energy. New forms of narrative do not. That is a positive. Our dominant media - the ones used to dominate - today are spreadsheets, databases and geographic information systems. What they share is their emphasis on space: a graph, for example, pictures time as space. Time-based media, whether narrative or otherwise (for example a logical argument or an essay-film) are important because they are not exclusively based on space and spatialisation. It is the reinvention of time that is the most significant aspect of new modes of narrative, and shared with other ways of expressing and experiencing time. Primordial mediation is without both space and time. Communication is characteristically spatial - it divides, which is a spatial act. Time in communication is a function of space - "a difference that makes a difference at some later time" as Bateson says. Critical work - including here invention and reinvention as creative practice - has to find a new mode of mediation, after communication, that is capable of including space and time. The obvious first "deconstructive" action is to prioritise time over space. That is what eco-critical thought looks for in temporal media
3. When artists from French Artistic Mission arrived in Brazil in 19th century - loaded with a Neoclassicism way of look at the landscape - they met resistance from local artists interested in Baroque. That is, the imposition of a way to look at things is not always assimilated. Do you think the same thing can happen in the field of data visualization? For instance, can you imagine an alien proprietary software company impose to scholars its technology to analyze data from recent political demonstrations in Brazil?
I am sure it is already happening: I have an MA student researching graphical representations of twitter feeds from Gezi Park in Istanbul during the protests. Data visualisation belongs with the spreadsheet etcetera as a spatial medium, at least in its dominant form. Simulations for example envisage the future as a continuation, not as a radical break. They attempt, by redefining action as behaviour, to change historical acts into data which can then be worked on biopolitically. To that extent data visualisation presumes a viewer who has power (if only imaginary) over the data. There are three weak spots: the conversion into data (selections, exclusions); the visualisation process applied to that data; and the modelling of the person or institution for whom that data is prepared. Many strategies are possible: to insist on the complexity of the unique instance or experience; to create alternative (ironic, creative) datasets; to contest what is left out of data; to contest the implicit humanism of data presentations, given that machines can read the data without visualisation; to emphasise the processing and transport of data rather than content or form; and many more. One thing all critical data visualisations have in common is that they resist the formation of the supreme subject, machinic or human.